Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Portage Git migration - clean cut or git-cvsserver

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 9:25 AM, Nicolas Sebrecht <nsebrecht@×××××.fr> wrote:
> So, like explained before your concern is clearly out of the current
> discussion. Importing commit history from Overlays is not supported and
> will probably never be. Gentoo doesn't forces (and doesn't want to)
> overlays maintainers to use Git.

I'm not sure that git even supports this, unless the overlay is a
complete clone of the entire gentoo-x86.git repository.

I think the way git operations work is by finding common parents in
the history of two heads, and then moving forward from there.  If you
have two completely different repositories then they never will have a
common parent.

Plus, even if it did work, to rebase the overlay on the gentoo-x86
repository you'd have to import the full gentoo-x86 tree into it.
Then you'd have to push EVERYTHING in your overlay into gentoo-x86.  I
don't think you can just push individual files from one tree to
another.

From what I've seen the various methods out there which do involve
moving only part of one branch into another basically involve a LOT of
history manipulation or are really no different than just copying the
files into the branch and adding them, losing all history in the
process.

I'm not sure how important all that history preservation actually is -
the overlay would still possess it.  If we did want to preserve it
then the only practical option I see is to have the overlay start out
as a clone of gentoo-x86 and keep around all the non-overlay packages,
which then means that anybody using the overlay will get all those old
gentoo-x86 packages as part of their portage tree.  Plus you still
have the rebase+gpg-signatures=fail issue.

Rich